Flight by Elephant (12 page)

Later that same day, four of the Commandos – the four friends, Gardiner, McCrindle, Boyt and Howe – together with the lately escaped Fraser and Pratt, also left the camp. They would try to contact the elusive rescue party and send it back to the railway and Rossiter parties. The enigmatic surveyor Moses left with the Commandos, possibly to escape the reproachful stares of Sir John. Mr Jardine of Lever Brothers also went with them, in spite of being forty-five, and looking more like seventy with his white beard.

And so, after Millar and Leyden, a second advance guard was being sent on.

Sir John and Edward Wrixon Rossiter had been reconciled to staying put in the Chaukan Pass and waiting for assistance, a tricky strategy with so little food, and one that went against the grain for Sir John, a man of action. The trouble had been a lack of porters, but, on 1 June, a party of about sixty soldiers turned up outside Sir John’s tent. As with the 102 ‘other ranks’ who’d come in with the two escapees from the Japanese, Fraser and Pratt, the majority of these were Gurkhas, and more typical of the breed in that they were inclined to be helpful to a Briton in distress.

Any British history of the Raj will feature encomium to the Gurkhas, ‘our faithful allies in India since 1813’. Gurkhas are from Nepal, a state lying between India and Tibet. It is sometimes mentioned in those encomia that the British had been fighting the Gurkhas before 1813, but this was regarded by the British as a good clean war (no doubt because they won), in which the enemy showed himself a formidable fighter. A deal was struck: Nepal was allowed independence from British rule in India. In return, the rulers of Nepal allowed their martial tribes (and the word Gurkhas encompasses many tribes and castes) to fight for the British. So it might be said that the Gurkhas ensured the independence of their homeland by curtailing that of other peoples who came up against the British in India.

Much sentimentality, and some mythology, surrounds the Gurkhas. In his memoir,
Bugles and a Tiger
, John Masters tells the story of a Gurkha regiment whose British officers called for volunteer parachutists. It was explained that this would involve jumping out of planes at about 1000 feet. ‘The officers were surprised and pained to find that only seventy men volunteered’, while others looked sceptical. It was later discovered that the volunteers had not appreciated the significance of the parachute. As far as they were concerned they were volunteering simply to jump out of a plane at 1000 feet, hence the slight reluctance. Masters also tells the story of the Gurkha who walked out of Burma after the Japanese invasion. He navigated alone from Rangoon to Assam using what turned out to be a street map of London.

The point of the story is to illustrate the mystical kinship between the Gurkha and the mother country that had adopted him. The typical Gurkha, with his direct gaze, satirical humour, intolerance of bullshit – all backed up by his trademark razor-edged kukri, or curved knife – would have done very well in the East End. Yes, he might be a Hindu, but not the picky kind. He liked a gamble, a smoke and a drink, and he was certainly not a vegetarian. (It is said that, in the First World War, Gurkha officers would even,
in extremis
, permit their men to eat bully beef, albeit with the labels removed from the tins, and on condition it was presented to the men as corned mutton.) And like many an East End hard man the Gurkha was only five foot tall and wore a wide-brimmed felt hat.

On 1 June, Sir John struck a deal with his Gurkhas, who had some food of their own: in exchange for payment, they would act as porters to the railway party and the Rossiters, and on 2 June they all set off: ‘The track was an exceedingly difficult one up and down hills and mountain sides. Some of the gradients were as steep as 1 in 1 …’ On 4 June, Sir John noted, it ‘Poured with rain from mid-night and continued all day … The weather and road were vile.’ 5 June: ‘Another vile pathway.’ 6 June: ‘
Another
vile pathway.’

When he woke from his sleep on the floor of the basha early in the morning of 5 June, Gyles Mackrell was confronted with a familiar problem: river trouble. It was still raining and the Namphuk was flowing fast, and – as far as he was concerned – in the wrong direction. Progress upstream in the canoe was slow, and it wasn’t until late morning that he reached his camp at Namgoi Mukh, where he found that ‘all the best elephants’ of his eighty-four had been loaded up by Chaochali and sent off towards the Hukawng Valley, and its starving refugees.

Other good elephants were ‘dispersed in the jungle’. It should be explained that tame elephants at work in the jungle are kept on a ‘free-range’ principle. They are left to forage in the vicinity of the camp, perhaps lightly hobbled with ropes tied around the two front feet, but in any case trained not to wander too far. Even so, the elephant man in the jungle is resigned to spending the first hour of his day rounding up his charges. The only alternative would be to bring the jungle to them, which would involve a lot of chopping down of leafy branches and scything grass.

Mackrell did not have the time to spare, so he began loading up twenty
reasonably
good elephants. The first thing a tame elephant carries on its back is a soft pad to protect its spine. The luggage is secured on top of that. What did Mackrell and Chaochali load onto those elephants? Firstly, food: the rice, dall, tea and so on that had been accumulating at his camp for dispatch to the Hukawng Valley route. Besides such basics, Mackrell took tinned sausages, tinned cheese (cheese generally came tinned in Assam in 1942) and jars of Marmite, which was popular with the British in India: it was easily transportable, and it didn’t go off. Marmite also symbolized home, even though it was named after a French cooking pot (
marmite
), and it was a German scientist, Justus von Lieberg, who first bottled brewer’s yeast as a savoury – and very salty – food. Whether Mackrell loved or hated Marmite – and the mythology is that no intermediate position is possible – he knew that it was considered a good prophylactic against the Vitamin B deficiency that causes beriberi, and its pungency was such that a small amount of it could flavour a lot of mouldy rice. He also took Bovril, which could change the taste of boiled water should anybody be so heretical as to become bored with tea. When Mackrell himself wanted to move on from tea, he tended to drink whisky or rum, and he took bottles of those, too. With his evening peg – and at other times – he liked to smoke cigarettes or, for preference, his pipe. So he took tins of cigarettes and tobacco. (The most popular brand of pipe tobacco in India in 1942 was called Barney’s, and it was advertised in magazines with a testimonial – allegedly unsolicited – from a man who had supposedly knocked about a good deal with the Norwegian whaling fleets. In the advertisements he told of how one night, while iced in somewhere close to the Arctic, he was offered £2 for his tin of Barney’s, which normally retailed at a shilling. He turned it down.)

Mackrell also took a wooden box full of medical supplies; some bed sheets, blankets and a collapsible camp bed for himself. He took some tents (unlike Millar and Leyden, he would have the benefit of these); some tarpaulins; some tins of kerosene; his portable HMV radio (which actually wasn’t all that portable); a fishing rod (but not necessarily for fishing, as we will see), at least two fishing nets, nail scissors (but not for cutting his nails, as we will also see), a quantity of dabs (sharp swords) and kukris, some rifles or shotguns, a Bren gun (a light machine gun); a gun-like lamp (switched on with the press of a trigger) for sending Morse signals to aeroplanes, together with a battery pack for same; two lengths of white oilcloth rolled around steel poles, on which three-letter Morse codes could be written out, with stones or jungle mud, to be read by passing aeroplanes. He took a number of umbrellas; a quantity of silver rupees; rope for tethering elephants; some tobacco tins containing raw opium wrapped in silver foil; pens, paper and envelopes bundled in a leather stationery folder with an oilcloth cover (for the writing of diary and chits); a collapsible canvas bath (an article commonly employed in India, and always sold with the proviso ‘For outdoor use only; some leakage is inevitable’). And he took at least one 16mm cine camera and film in canisters, because he was a keen amateur film-maker.

Mackrell packed in a hurry. Not only was he trying to save starving people, but if he delayed his departure he might be ordered not to go. He knew the Chaukan route was considered by military and civilian authorities alike to be unsurvivable in the monsoon; a rescue mission would be deemed too dangerous, a waste of manpower and elephants. Millar and Leyden had survived it, but only just, and they were relatively young and fit and had the good luck of meeting the Mishmis. Also, the route was becoming more difficult with each successive day’s rain.

Mackrell set off at dawn on Saturday 6 June. He had left instructions for Chaochali to muster another team of elephants, and to follow him into the Chaukan as soon as he could hand over the original relief operation from Namgoi Mukh – serving the Hukawng Valley – to others.

At 4 p.m. on the 6th, Mackrell and his elephants arrived at Miao, the village on the south bank of the Noa Dehing that Millar and Leyden had come to about thirty miles after crossing the Dapha. Miao is pronounced – by the British – like the noise a cat makes. It was, and still is, a pretty spot: a tight cluster of tin-roofed shops and bamboo houses overlooking the wide river, fields of grazing cattle and the soaring blue hills beyond.

Mackrell would have to cross to the north side of the Noa Dehing because any Chaukan refugees would be progressing along this side. Millar and Leyden had probably been rowed across it by a Miao ferryman, but it was higher and faster now, and Mackrell wanted to get his elephants over. Besides, the ferrymen of that Buddhist village – and every other resident – were attending a funeral. Life in Assamese villages is communal. If a house is built, everyone chips in with a material or physical contribution. Similarly, everyone attends a funeral: the sacrifice, the prayers, the interment, the feasting. The headman of the village, a man called Mat Ley, told Mackrell he would have to put off the crossing until the next day. So Mackrell and his mahouts stayed in a dak bungalow – or government guest house – on a cliff above the river. The packs were taken off the elephants and they were put to graze.

Dinner was cooked by Mackrell’s personal servant of the past thirty years, an Assamese called Apana. He and Mackrell ate with the mahouts. Mackrell basically liked the mahouts, and when they were behaving well he called them his ‘boys’, as in ‘made tea for all the boys’, a frequent diary entry. He admired their skill, their closeness to the elephants. A mahout does not necessarily work with the same elephant but ideally he would do, and that’s a lifetime relationship, since an elephant lives for between fifty and seventy years. The story is told of the Assamese mahout who was keen on drink – by no means a unique case. One afternoon, he came back from a lunchtime session and keeled over in a jungle clearing. Seeing that the sun was beating down on the small prostrate figure, the mahout’s elephant stood over him for an hour while he slept, making shade. Elephants are as endearingly loyal to a single master in that way as dogs, which, by the way, elephants hate. There may have been extra fellow feeling between that elephant and his mahout because elephants, too, have a taste for alcohol. In his book
Elephants
, Richard Carrington writes, ‘Nearly every elephant worth his salt will knock back a gallon of beer with the enthusiasm of a cricket team after a thirsty match’, and in
The Ivory King
Charles Holder mentions an elephant that could ‘draw a cork from a bottle of claret and drink the contents without spilling a drop’. It was the habit of tea garden labourers of Assam – who lived in huts with mud walls – to keep rice wine in buckets or cooking pots. The elephants which also laboured in the tea gardens would sometimes use their trunks to punch a hole through the walls in order to suck up the wine. Having become drunk, they might then knock down the entire hut.

After dinner, Mackrell unpacked his portable HMV radio and sat on the veranda. All was dark below; a light rain was falling. He lit his pipe. If he had tuned into Radio Tokyo, he would have heard the announcer with the almost perfect English accent boasting that Japanese Imperial Forces had completed the liberation of the Burmese people. Or, if he wanted to take his mind off the war and the foaming river below, he might have tuned the dial until he picked up some light jazz, of the kind played in his favourite restaurant in Calcutta, Firpo’s on Park Street. Either way he would have been sipping a whisky, while the mahouts smoked a little opium.

The next morning, Sunday 7 June, Mackrell and his men took their twenty elephants down to the sandy banks of the river. They were accompanied by some of the villagers, including the headman, Mat Ley. It had stopped raining, but the clouds were mustering for another downpour and the water still raced. While grateful for Mat Ley’s offer of boats, Mackrell was determined to cross with the elephants. It would be no harder for them to cross with their loads than without, and the elephants were needed on the other side – for marching up to, and then crossing, the notorious Dapha. The mahouts roved up and down the white stones of the riverbank, looking for crossing places. Some of the elephants seemed keener on finding them than others. A few had wandered over to graze on bamboo leaves in a thicket some distance from the bank, as if to say, ‘River? What river?’

Mackrell had his eye on a particular mahout. He was called Gohain, and he was Mackrell’s personal mahout, his chauffeur you might say, and he was aboard a male elephant called Phuldot. (All captive elephants are given names, but this is in order that they can be talked about rather than because they answer to their names. If you stand a few feet away from an elephant and call out its name, it will slowly fix you with a rather disparaging stare with its tiny white and bleary eyes, and that’s about it.) Phuldot was a good elephant, and Gohain was a good mahout.